The Philosophical and Grammatical Concept of Time in the Narratological Process

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Bujar Hodža

1. General remarks

The measuring of the past time and its determining in various scientific and professional categories is as old as the existence of the human being as a conscious one. This theoretical unit, first of all of a philosophical nature, has an enormous importance for the field of artistic expression. Differing from the importance of the physical conception of time ( i.e. the one that concerns the nature and mathematical sciences), in the case of the artistic fields ( the various ones), except its physical and philosophical determination, it has psychological importance, as well as a communicative ones by which it overpasses the limits of its exactness. We cannot say anything concerning the concept of time if all of this is not accompanied by a series of theoretical analysis, which in the cases of the concrete artistic expression gets established as a compulsory element.

The similarities, as well as the differences among the various artistic fields, taken simply from the synchronically aspect of study ( or even if we wanted from a diachronic one, of one who would be concerned with the origin, etymology, or the historiography of the artistic existence), represent the possibilities of incorporating of a series of interpretations and various structures of the time shapes and forms divided concretely into its surface and deep structures.

If we are to express the objectivity of the daily events relative to the human activities, it leads us to the anthropocentric philosophy up to G.W. Hegel, which was characterized as a category of an objective absolutism. The radical changes in the various philosophical interpretations, have in fact started from John Lock, who brought the elements of irrationality and the elements of the artistic sensibility; or in one word, to the unanalyzed issues until that time.

In the contemporary days, “ the human being is a onthic and onthologic being limited by its temporality”, says M.Heidegger in his “Being and Time”. We have the post-Kantian philosophical school here, which by simple words returns to the human being its subjectivity and psychoanalyses. “ Leaving of traces”, says S. Freud, “ are a basis for the development of the signs of psychic growth of human beings; and this enables it to think about the history of writing, as well as about its existence”. Further on, Freud sees the absence of traces, on the basis of which the origin of the human artistic expression would be determined,

as an element that leads towards pathology , or “ the incapability of the spiritual, physical and sexual dimensions is compensated by repression”.

The art, being a very individualistic and emotional expression of being of an “ontological” background according to Heidegger, its possibility the way of coming out in the surface structure through the deep structure according to the linguists John Lyons and Noam Chomsky , sees through the important element of time; and not only this, not only by its philosophical determination but also by its psychological and linguistic one. These in fact, represent various levels or better various analytical grounds, which according to Arthur Schopenhouer repeat themselves endlessly. The fundamental importance of these “ repetitions of the artistic categories” is the determining of the changing effects, their similarity and development from one repetition to another. Examples: if the artistic description of a writer in a phrase, sentence, or finally in a fragment or a text (which again have to do with time and quantity) has not reached the right aim of his purpose in the description process, or better narratological and analytical process (this, in turn being the pre-expressionist phase of his writing which will happen in the future), the writer will then reach it in his next repetition; this time using new elements which contribute to his intentions . These elements are as a matter of fact the means of theory of literature: intertext, intratext, ( or the paraphrasing, ect). However, this time in a different level, depending on the fact whether this time the writer wants to explain the dreams of a protagonist, or his own psychological situation. Here we come again to the concept of time, if we want, even to the grammatical one (whether he will use the Imperfect[1], the perfect[2], first person singular or the third one). The artistic expression in the scene is measured definitely by the concept of time, since it must be dramaturgically determined which are the phases of development of events that put into functioning the rentability of time. The fragment, insert, or the monologue may make slower the philosophical flow of time, or it may make it faster? In the past, the epic poetry expressed an event which occurred in the past, the description was traditional, even in the sense of time, nevertheless, in the eras of Modern and Post-modern literature the intertext (the “middle” text) intervenes, which has

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1. In English used by other means morphologically, not by determined morphemes in terms of suffixation or prefixation; differing from the Indo-European and Neo-Latin languages.2. In English the Past Perfect Tense.

happened in quite another conceptualization of time, in comparison with the general flow of events.

2. The time as a linguistic concept

General linguistics, its history, can explain to us the changes of the time categories in various periods. The exactness of time expression, even if we wanted the philosophical one, is based on the linguistic expression. The verb, i. e. the action, tells us in which tense some event has been occurring, or has occurred. This is more than important for the artistic expression, as it establishes the essentials of the analytical critique: it happened now, or in the past; somebody came and stopped the events of the past, of the time which had been running, and this way implicated another time, ect.

It goes without saying that our intention here is not to further analyze the linguistic concepts and the special behavior of time in various linguistic occurrences, as our purpose is to emphasize its touching points with the artistic expression. The “saint” grammatical concept for the artistic expression is the Imperfect Tense. The continuity of events. We don’t know when the event started, but we know that the event continues. For example, if we took the novel of Italo Calvino “Se un viaggiatore una notte d’inverno” (“If a traveler, on a winter’s night”), starts in the following way: “I didn’t know whether to write this book or not, but anyway, I will. It’s a very bad one, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to read it”. Since when did the author know whether to write the book or not? And we would ask ourselves; where is the importance of all of this? We’ll respond now: in the beginning of the continuity of event; an activity which was happening in the past will be described, this event or activity is being developed, the culmination is being reached, ect.

The Imperfect, is a grammatical category, which in the artistic expression determines that the theme is on its course of development. We can take another example to clarify this point: in the opera art for example. We know that in the first act of “Rigoletto”, in the time when the duet between Rigoletto and Gilda continues, which represents the continuity of an event, the narrator, Rigoletto, tells us how devoted is he to his daughter Gilda, and how did her mother die. To this event (which is rather

a long one accompanied by repetitions) intervenes a perfect tense the aorist: the serving woman in the house appears who tells to Gilda: “ The Duke of Mantova is upstairs”. How do we semantically resolve this situation? Gilda has fallen in love with the Duke of Mantova, but she doesn’t have the courage to express this in front of her father; and, as consequence of this, she gets informed about the arrival of her lover in a secret way. And finally, to express this we need a definite, a perfect, a closed concept of time. Or if we put it with semiotic terms: the message of the middle-text (the inter-text) passes through the communication channel from a sign to a sign, in our case the Duke and Gilda, however, Rigoletto (the first sign in the semiotic triangle) must not know, i.e. according to the narratology theory of the Italian semiotician, Umberto Eco, the absent structure in this case. It goes without saying that even the musical expression in that instant changes, the rhythm now changes from the one that previously was a melancholic one, a romantic one – prepared for the accompaniment of the duet – now it is more decisive; this as a matter of fact foresees the arrival of a new temporal interval, in comparison with the one that had been described until that point of time.

And, for reasons of comparison, we shall compare all of this with the novel of the famous Italian theoretician Prof. Umberto Eco: “The Name of the Rose”. (“Il nome della rosa”). It is generally known that in this novel no one knew why did the people die throughout the event without any reason. The semiotic systems of the teacher and the pupil are in a permanent communication, in order to reach the aim: to discover what actually has been happening in the biblioteque of that church. On the other hand, on the other side of the communication channel the absent structure is found, which is discovered only at the end: the book in the biblioteque had been poisoned (in the place where everybody could not enter); and as consequence, anybody who tried opening the saint book, died. So, the fact that the absent structure gets discovered in the end, interrupts the course of the imperfect tense by a determined and a closed tense, which tells us: “The book had been poisoned”.

The various combination and interaction of various time categories, can be found in other artistic works as well. Here we shall give one more example. If the scene of the big march in the opera “Aida” of Verdi has a semantic category of a victory from the war aspect, the appearance of Amonastro in the midst of the scene, and his dialogue with his daughter Aida, are described by a perfect tense (a definite one), although the dramatic situations like: “Glory to Egypt”, “Let’s go to fight”, or “Come back victorious”, are situations in their course of occurrence.

If we continue with similar observations, almost in each and every artistic field with an expressional importance (with a narratological one or a telling one, even if we wanted like Berthold Brecht has once said: “Show what you have to show, because it is important to show”), we shall see that the concept of time, above all with its linguistic basis, in a wider sense, has implications on a semantic, philosophical and psychological level.

3. The philosophical level: or ars interpretandi

Owing to the fact that it is not easy to write, exactly because the basis of writing are found in the history and the ways of writing, or according to the psycholinguist and philosopher Jacques Derrida’ in his “L’ecriture et la difference,” those basis of writing are in a close relation with differences within the various ways of writing, it is natural to say that if we talk about the philosophical concept of time from the literal aspect, we should “borrow” facts also from the science of philosophy; or according to Edward Levines (in his “The Totality and Infinity”), with “ the way of interpretation of the intellectual production of man as a onthologic totality”. Otherwise, will not have all the indispensable elements of analysis. The literary critique, the one that is responsible of evaluating the work of art; one of the most essential elements in the aesthetics of reception (at least according to the German philologist Hans Robert Jauss), has the main part in the analysis of the work of art. The basis or better the highest level of such an analysis the philosophical branch of hermeneutics, which in turn represents the philosophical analysis (or better decomposing) of the work of art, in its narrowest sense. But, hermeneutics does not stop only to that. It concerns also the analysis

of human values (which basis is in axiology and psychology), as well as the revising of the different phases of the literary text by the side of the author. As a consequence of this, the hermeneutics from the literal point of view considers principally these two grounds, which represent a totality from the philosophical point of view. Examples: if the novels of Henry James or of Dostoyewski represent the culmination of the psychological novel, we would put the question, what was the way in which the author, through the examples of the narrators has formulated the concept of time? Or, another question: when did Stephen Dedalus speak in the first person singular or Ulysses; are such expressed opinions, opinions of the author or they belong to someone else? Or do they represent a half-awakened psychological status of the protagonist that would represent a reminiscence or a half-reminiscence of his or her actions? Hermeneutics, according to the scientists themselves, represents a higher level of analysis in comparison with semiotics, exactly because it builds a critical and a self-critical approach. That is the reason for the saying that hermeneutics is the art of interpretation (“ars interpretandi”), which consists of ars explicandi and ars syllabandi. Examples: if Iago in the play “Othello” by William Shakespeare is a modus vivendi protagonist, how do the other characters behave? How do we explain the victory of Othello with the army, taking into account the humiliating element that surrounds him, and the unseriousness of his naпve behaviour? Did the author really foresee to have such characters? These are the questions which hermeneutics would put forwards, keeping of course always in mind, not to run into ad absurdum, or to close the hermeneutic circle. And this can be explained by the fact that philosophy, or according to Heidegger (we mention him because “without a phenomenology there is not ontology”), the onthical and ontological determination of the human being passes to the extra-logical field, in the frames of the irrationality; and we have to find the solution in the abstract hermeneutic decomposing of categories. In that context, speaking concretely, semiotics would put forwards the following questions: which would be the communication channel through which we would understand the marital relationship between Othello and Desdemona? Is there something that has gone wrong? Or: why Macbeth should be so “black”? The semiotic topos of ambition, the desire for the crown, is

developed through its trip within the frames of the communication channel; whereas the message that comes out on the other side of the communication channel are the tragic consequences, which are being described.

If we take linguistics as a basis, especially the theory of Ferdinand de Sossire, we can conclude the following: hermeneutics and semiotics as binary oppositions, as an interrelation, as main factors in the process of interpretation, are linked by the category of time. Further: an encoding and precoding process must occur of the signs themselves, the semic codes of Roland Barthes are being constituted, we obtain this way the toposes of Algirades Jullien Greimass, coming this way to the deep structure. Seen from semiological aspect, it represents a relationship between the structures. If two semantic entities communicate we have got the correlation between them; we create this way the complex structure of the temporal parallelism in the frames of the global event (the contents in the novel, the epical narrating in epics, the development of the dramatic situation in dramaturgy, the development of the main theme and the implication of the secondary theme and their correlation in reaching the culmination in the sonata, symphony, ect). This, as a matter of fact explains the art as a temporal correlation among all these elements.